The use of industry standard open architectures has been widely seen as the way forward in reducing the cost, footprint and support requirements of automated test systems (ATS). However, these architectures themselves pose challenges. Open architectures are based on commercial computer standards, which can change very rapidly. This can lead to a proliferation of hardware, which creates the very support problems that the use of open standards was meant to resolve. Also, the architectures are optimized for digital or low frequency analog signals and the implementation of high performance microwave tests can be technically very challenging.
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